Expanding Ibm Likes Florida, Southeast As The Communications Giant Strives To Keep Pace With The Rapid Growth Of The Computer Industry, It Is Pouring Money Into Operations In Florida, Georgia And North Carolina.

May 2, 1985|By Susan Postlewaite, United Press International

For the first time in 15 years, International Business Machines held its annual stockholders meeting in Atlanta, a site that reflects IBM`s continuing expansion in the Southeast.

Company officials said the annual meeting, held Monday at the Atlanta Civic Center, is ``part of our longstanding tradition of moving the annual meeting from place to place each year to reach more shareholders.``

Last year`s meeting was in Los Angeles; before that it was in Boston.

``IBM has made its strength through its decentralization. It would be hard to say I see a trend that IBM is consolidating its manufacturing in the South,`` said company spokesman Larry Phipps in Atlanta.

Even so, as the communications giant strives to keep pace with the rapid growth of the computer industry, it is pouring money into operations in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.

Big Blue reported it spent $10 billion in capital expenditures last year worldwide. It reportedly will spend $56 billion in the next five years, with a healthy slice of that in the Southeast.

IBM has an option to buy 1,500 acres in Columbia, S.C. It owns 910 undeveloped acres near Athens, Ga., near the University of Georgia, and the company recently took 2,000 acres off the market near Gainesville, near the University of Florida.

About 30,000 of IBM`s 395,000 employees work at facilities in the Southeast -- in Charlotte, Boca Raton and Tampa, Lexington, Ky., Atlanta and the Raleigh-Durham, N.C. area -- all areas that have universities nearby.

Millions of square feet of new office space are under construction or have been announced in Atlanta, Boca Raton and Charlotte in the next couple of years.

IBM`s largest operation in the region is in Boca Raton, which has about 9,000 employees. The facility is headquarters for its Entry Systems Division, which was responsible for developing the IBM personal computer line, including the PC and PCjr. Its robotics department is also headquartered there. IBM subleased the manufacture of its PCjr to Teledyne in Tennessee.

In Tampa, IBM has 700 programmers and other computer employees working at its Information Network, a data communications network control room for IBM computer users nationwide. The administrative headquarters for the network is in Connecticut, but the actual computers and programmers are in Tampa.

IBM`s growth in Florida was nearly halted when the Legislature passed a unitary tax on multi-national companies in 1983. IBM`s initial reaction to the tax was to cancel plans to expand in Boca Raton and to put 2,000 acres it owns in Gainesville on the market.

With the repeal of the tax in December, IBM eagerly took the land off the market, announcing it will expand office and administrative space in Boca Raton. No plans have been disclosed for the land near Gainesville.

IBM`s biggest capital expansion in the region will be in Atlanta, where IBM has its headquarters for its National Marketing Division, as well as an employee training school and a National Distribution Division office. About 5,000 IBM employees work in Atlanta.

Later this year, construction is scheduled to start on an approximately 50-story, 1 million-square-foot office tower, to be called the IBM Tower. The new building in midtown is intended to consolidate several hundred IBM employees who now work in scattered offices, a spokesman said.

IBM also plans to double the size of its 360,000 square foot National Marketing Division headquarters building and said it is also in the final stages of negotiations with Cousins Properties for a major office development site near the perimeter of Atlanta.

Elsewhere in the South, about 6,000 IBM employees work in Lexington, Ky., where IBM just completed a $350 million modernization program, making the plant there one of its most streamlined manufacturing operations anywhere for the production of typewriters, printers and keyboards, Phipps said.

In Charlotte, N.C., 5,000 employees in the Information Products Division turn out printers, circuit board assemblies, and financial services equipment. A 365,000-square-foot building is under construction there.

One of IBM`s oldest production facilities is in the Raleigh-Durham area, where it employs about 9,000 workers. About 250 products are manufactured at the facility, which is also being expanded.